At Mon, 27 Oct 2008 09:53:30 +0100 (CET), Jaroslav Kysela wrote:
On Mon, 27 Oct 2008, Takashi Iwai wrote:
And, the current smixer abstraction sucks. Really.
Because we do not have any abstraction available at this moment. The smixer API is not bad itself, it's just about internal alsa-lib code and how to implement abstraction layers. Also, for applications using PCM devices we need to add two functions handling all used channels like this:
/* for PCM stream volume control */ int snd_pcm_mixer_element(snd_pcm_t *pcm, snd_mixer_t *mixer, snd_mixer_elem_t **elem); /* for Master volume control - will not be available for recording */ int snd_pcm_mixer_master(snd_pcm_t *pcm, snd_mixer_t *mixer, snd_mixer_elem_t **elem);
My idea is to describe the correlations between PCM and mixer in the standard .conf files defining PCM devices.
The internal smixer interface can be extended using dynamic C library now, but the question is, who will write C modules for all cards. I also prepared python interface to allow fast smixer prototyping. Another possibility is to create a C module which will parse a text configuration file describing the abstaction.
Yes, I know these. Still, nothing is there over years. And I'm afraid of being so forever.
IMHO, a big part of the problem is its overly complex layers and old-style mixer API (in addition to complete lack of documentation). The plugin solution doesn't work well because you are tring to graft orange and apple.
Takashi